The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry (16 page)

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Authors: Jon Ronson

Tags: #Social Scientists & Psychologists, #Psychopathology, #Sociology, #Psychology, #Popular Culture.; Bisacsh, #Social Science, #Popular Culture, #Psychopaths, #General, #Mental Illness, #Biography & Autobiography, #Social Psychology, #History.; Bisacsh, #History

BOOK: The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry
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“Ow!” I yelled. “That really hurts. Would you please turn down the level of the electric shock? I mean, I thought that had been outlawed. What was that level?”
“Three,” said Adam.
“What does it go up to?” I asked.
“Eight,” he said.
Adam performed various tests on me to monitor my anxiety level, and for much of it I glared suspiciously at the button that administered the electric shock, sometimes letting off little involuntary spasms, and when it was over, he confirmed from his EEG readings that I was indeed above average on the anxiety scale.
“Ooh!” I thought, unexpectedly pleased to hear that there really was something identifiably wrong with me. Then I said, “I suppose it probably isn’t a great idea for a man like me who suffers from excessive anxiety to chase after people who have a pathological deficit of anxiety.”
Adam nodded. He said I really had to be careful. Psychopaths are truly dangerous, he said. And they’re often the people you least expect them to be.
“When I was doing my Ph.D.,” he said, “I devised this personality test, and I advertised for volunteers amongst the student population. I put notices on the notice board, and a girl turned up. Young girl. She was a second-year student. About nineteen. She said, ‘This is a personality test, isn’t it?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ She said, ‘I’ve got a
bad
personality. I like to hurt people.’ I thought she was winding me up. I said, ‘Okay, fine.’ So we went through the tests. When she was looking at the photographs of the mutilated bodies, the sensors showed that she was getting a kick off of them. Her sexual reward center—it’s a sexual thing—was fired up by blood and death. It’s subconscious. It happens in milliseconds. She found those things
pleasant
.”
I looked over at Adam. Describing the moment was obviously making him feel uncomfortable. He was an anxious man, like me, hence, he said, his decision to dedicate his life to the study of the relationship between anxiety and the brain.
“She told me she’d tried to join the RAF,” he said, “because they’re the only part of the Ministry of Defence that allows women to operate weapon systems, but they sussed her out and rejected her. So she ended up doing history. Hers wasn’t psychopathy in terms of being a manipulative con man. She told me about her homicidal desire the minute she met me, which suggests she wouldn’t score high on the trait of smooth deceptiveness. But at the core of psychopathy is a lack of moral restraint. If a person lacks moral restraint and also happens to get turned on by violence, then you end up with a very dangerous serial-killer type who lusts after killing and doesn’t have any moral hang-ups about doing so. There must be people in the population who get turned on by killing but have moral restraints that prevent them from acting out their fantasies, unless they’re drunk or tired or whatever. I guess she falls into this category, which is why she tried to join the RAF, so she could obtain a socially respectable opportunity to gratify her homicidal urges.”
“So what did you
do
about her?” I asked. “Did you call the police?”
“I was put in a difficult position,” he said. “She hadn’t done any crimes. My hands were tied. There are no mechanisms in place to stop her.”
Adam and Bob and Martha seemed sure that, with psychopaths, chaos was a foregone conclusion. This girl, forbidden from killing in a socially acceptable way, will probably end up as “one of those angel-of-death nurses or something,” Adam said. Someone who just
has
to murder.
I wondered if it ever crossed Adam’s and Bob’s minds that the logical solution to the psychopath problem would be to lock them up before they’d actually done anything wrong—even if proposing such a measure would make them the villains from an Orwell novel, which isn’t something anyone imagines they’ll be when setting out on their career path.
“Where is this woman now?” I asked Adam. “Maybe I could meet her for my book? In a busy café or something.”
“I’ve no means of tracking her down,” Adam said. “Participants in my studies are recorded only by numbers, not by name.” He fell silent for a second. “So she’s gone,” he said.
Adam’s point was that now I was in the psychopath-spotting business, I should be very vigilant. This was a perilous game. I had to trust nobody. These people were unsafe to be around. And sometimes psychopaths were nineteen-year-old women studying history in a London university.
“They come in all shapes and sizes,” he said.
 
 
Now, as Bob Hare and I neared Cardiff, I considered his theory about psychopathic CEOs and psychopathic politicians and I remembered items 18 and 12 on his checklist—
Juvenile Delinquency
and
Early behavior problems
—
An individual who has a history of serious antisocial behavior
.
“If some political or business leader had a psychopathically hoodlum childhood, wouldn’t it come out in the press and ruin them?” I said.
“They find ways to bury it,” Bob replied. “Anyway, Early Behavior Problems doesn’t necessarily mean ending up in Juvenile Hall. It could mean, say, secretly torturing animals.” He paused. “But getting access to people like that can be difficult. Prisoners are easy. They like meeting researchers. It breaks up the monotony of their day. But CEOs, politicians . . .” Bob looked at me. “It’s a really big story,” he said. “It’s a story that could change forever the way people see the world.”
Suddenly Tony in Broadmoor felt a long way away. Bob was right: this really could be a big story. And my desire to unearth it outweighed any anxieties that were bubbling up inside me. I had to journey, armed with my new psychopath-spotting abilities, into the corridors of power.
5.
 
TOTO
 
S
omewhere along a long, flat expanse of nothingness between Woodstock and Albany, upstate New York, sits a forbidding Victorian-looking building with concrete and barbed wire tentacles snaking out across the empty fields. It’s called the Coxsackie Correctional Facility. Although it was mid-May, sheets of icy rain bombarded me as I wandered around the perimeter, not knowing what to do. Back when I had visited Broadmoor, letters of confirmation had arrived weeks earlier, lists of visiting hours and detailed regulations. Here there was nothing. No signs, no guards. On the phone a distant, crackly voice had told me to “yeahjustcome-whenever.” This place was truly the Wild West, visitor procedure–wise. It was confusing, unordered, and unnerving.
There was only one person on the landscape: a young woman shivering in a glass shelter, so I went and stood near her.
“It’s cold,” I said.
“It’s always cold here,” she said.
 
 
Eventually, we heard a clang. A gate automatically opened, and we walked through an outdoor metal corridor underneath a tapestry of barbed wire and into a dark lobby filled with prison guards.
“Hello,” I said cheerfully.
“Hey, well, look who it is!” hollered one. “Harry Potter.” The guards surrounded me.
“Hello, mister jolly old mister marvelous,” someone said.
“Oh, ribbing!” I said.
“Jolly good jolly good,” they said. “Who are you here to see?”
“Emmanuel Constant,” I said.
At this, they stopped laughing.
“He’s a mass murderer,” said a guard, looking quite impressed.
“He once had dinner with Bill Clinton,” said another. “Have you met him before?”
 
 
1997. Emmanuel “Toto” Constant stood on the sidewalk of a long, flat residential street in Queens, New York, looking up and down, trying to spot me. Far away in the distance, through the heat haze and the traffic fumes, you could just make out the Manhattan skyline, a glint of the Chrysler Building, the Twin Towers, but there were no magnificent skyscrapers around here, no downtown bars full of sophisticates, just boxy one-story DVD rental places and fast-food restaurants. Unlike his neighbors, who were dressed in T-shirts and shorts and baseball caps on this hot day, Toto Constant was wearing an immaculate pale suit with a silk handkerchief in his top pocket. He was manicured and dapper (very similarly dapper, in retrospect, to how I would first see Tony, years later, in Broadmoor).
I pulled up and parked.
“Welcome to Queens,” he said, sounding apologetic.
 
 
There was a time, in the early 1990s, when Toto Constant owned a sprawling Art Deco mansion with a swimming pool and fountains in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. He was skinny and handsome and charismatic back then and was seen around town carrying an Uzi or a .357 Magnum. It was from his mansion that he set up a far-right paramilitary group, FRAPH, created to terrorize supporters of the recently exiled left-wing democratic president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. It was unclear back then who was backing Constant, who was paying his way.
According to human rights groups like the Center for Constitutional Rights and Human Rights Watch, when FRAPH caught an Aristide supporter, they’d sometimes slice off the person’s face. When a group of Aristide supporters holed up in a shantytown called Cité Soleil, Constant’s men turned up with gasoline—this was December 1993—and burned the place to the ground. At one point that day some children tried to run away from the fire. The men from FRAPH caught them and forced them back inside their burning homes. There were fifty murders that day, and many other bloodbaths during Constant’s reign. In April 1994, for example, FRAPH men raided a harbor town, Raboteau, another center of Aristide support. They arrested and beat and shot and dunked into the open sewers all the residents they could catch. They commandeered fishing boats so they could shoot people fleeing across the sea.
The modus operandi of FRAPH was to team up with members of the Haitian Armed Forces in midnight raids of the poorest neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince, Gonaives and other cities. In a typical raid, the attackers would invade a house in search of evidence of pro-democracy activity, such as photos of Aristide. The men of the house would frequently be abducted and subjected to torture; many would be summarily executed. The women would frequently be gang-raped, often in front of the remaining family members. The ages of documented victims range from as young as 10 to as old as 80. According to witness reports, sons were forced at gunpoint to rape their own mothers.
—CENTER FOR JUSTICE AND ACCOUNTABILITY
 
 
Aristide was restored to power in October 1994, and Toto Constant fled to America, leaving photos of the mutilated bodies of FRAPH victims pasted to the walls of his Port-au-Prince headquarters. He was arrested in New York. U.S. authorities announced their intention to deport him back to Port-au-Prince so he could stand trial for crimes against humanity. There was much celebrating in Haiti. In readiness for the impending trial, three women stepped forward to tell prosecutors they had been raped by Constant’s men and left for dead. His fate looked sealed.
 
 
But he had one play left. From his jail cell he announced on CBS’s
60 Minutes
that he was ready to reveal the names of his backers, the mysterious men who had encouraged the creation of FRAPH and put him on their payroll. They were agents from the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency.
“If I’m guilty of the crimes they say I was,” he told the interviewer, Ed Bradley, “the CIA is also guilty.”
 
 
It wasn’t easy to understand why the CIA would want to back a murderous, antidemocratic death squad. Aristide was a charismatic man, a leftist, a former priest. Maybe they feared he was a Castro in the making, a man who might threaten business relations between Haiti and the U.S.
Still, if anyone doubted Constant’s word, they didn’t for long. He inferred that should the extradition go ahead, he’d reveal devastating secrets about American foreign policy in Haiti. Almost immediately—on June 14, 1996—the U.S. authorities released him from jail and gave him a green card to work in the U.S. But there were conditions, laid out in a five-page settlement deal that was faxed by the U.S. Department of Justice to the prison’s booking area and handed to Constant on his exit. He was forbidden from ever talking to the media. He had to move in with his mother in Queens and could never, ever leave the borough, except for an hour each week when he was to check in with the Immigration and Naturalization Service in Manhattan. But as soon as he checked in, he had to drive straight back to Queens.
Queens was to be his prison.
 
 
When I heard this story back in the late 1990s, I decided to approach Toto Constant for an interview. I wanted to learn how a man used to wielding such tremendous, malevolent power was adapting to life back home in the suburbs with his mother. Now that he had crash-landed into the ordinary world, would the memory of his crimes eat him up, like Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov? Plus, Queens had a thriving Haitian community, which meant he was surely living among some of his own victims. I wrote to him, fully expecting a refusal. Talking to me would, after all, have violated the terms of his release. Once the authorities found out, he could well have been arrested, deported back to Haiti, and executed. Prospective interviewees tend to turn me down for a lot less than that. Many decline my interview requests simply because they think I might portray them as a little crazy. Nonetheless, he cheerfully agreed to meet me. I didn’t ask why because I was just glad to get the interview and—if I’m honest—I didn’t really worry about what would happen to him as a result, which I suppose is a little
Item 6: Lack of Remorse or Guilt
,
Item 7: Shallow Affect
, and
Item 8: Callous/Lack of Empathy
, but he was a death-squad leader, so who cares?

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